 49 On the Road in Olympic-­Era Tokyo Bruce Suttmeier

figure 49.1 “A Comparative Map of Traffic n September 1964, with the Tokyo Olympics a mere month away, Volumes and Traffic Capacities in 1964” [Sanju¯ the streets of Japan’s capital were being repaired and refurbished, kyu¯ nen ni okeru ko¯tsu¯ to ko¯tsu¯ yo¯ryo¯ no scrubbed and smoothed, in an effort, as reporters often put it, to pre- hikaku zu 三十九年における交通と交通容 I 量の比較図]. Reproduced by permission from vent the city’s already slow-moving­ streets from suffering total paralysis. Shintoshi 新都市18(9), September 1964, 35. City The specter of such gridlock spurred massive spending on all kinds of Planning Association of Japan. transportation projects, from the Tokyo Monorail to the bullet train to eight new subway routes. Spending on transportation consumed about 75 percent of the city’s total one-­trillion-­yen cost for its five-­year Olympic overhaul.1 But no project altered Tokyo more than the radically repurposed streets and new highways that emerged on the eve of the Games. Huge elevated expressways, some over forty meters high, began winding their way through the city in the early 1960s, dwarfing nearby buildings, shad- owing parks and canals, and towering over large swaths of public spaces. Several modest surface streets nearly doubled in width following the re- moval of residential buildings and businesses. Such altered streetscapes,

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You are reading copyrighted material published by University of Chicago Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. On the Road in Olympic- ­Era Tokyo 211 while promoted as Olympic projects, were decades in ropolitan Police Department’s Office of Transportation the making. They arose as part of a push by the era’s city Planning and Research), stresses the city’s readiness, ar- planners to make Tokyo a more modern (and modernist) guing that despite the dire predictions of clogged streets metropolis, a place whose slow-moving­ streets—filled­ and congested traffic, the city is well prepared to handle with chatting pedestrians and playing children—­were the Olympic crowds. How could a map showing so many redesigned as “efficient” and “orderly” thoroughfares trouble spots make such a claim? reserved for the fast-­moving motorist. They arose out of Answering this question requires knowledge of the expanding body of research that sought, as Tokyo Olympic geography and midcentury trends in Tokyo added over ten thousand new vehicles to its roads each development. Looking at the map again, we see a dark-­ month, to understand and accommodate the extraordi- shaded cluster of five intersections in the upper right side nary demands of modern mobility, an imperative essen- of the page, where seventeen of twenty-one­ streets were tial not only to the city’s Olympic success, but also to its overburdened with traffic. These five crossings alone long-­term viability. contain half of the map’s thirty-­four designated trouble Such research is on stark display in a map published spots. What about these sites would make them prone to in a special Olympic issue of the journal Shintoshi (New such congestion? One answer, obscured by the map’s to- city), a publication catering to planning officials and pological design, is the cluster’s proximity to the center policymakers (fig. 49.1).2 The map shows traffic volumes of the city. By the late 1950s, the streets around the Impe- around Tokyo in 1964 and catalogs possible trouble rial Palace were notoriously congested, containing nine spots in the run-­up to the games. As readers of this map, of the ten worst intersections in the city.3 Yet none of the what are we to make of this wonky web of lines and cir- city’s most congested intersections, many of which lay cles, crammed with numbers, names, and percentages? to the east of the palace, even appear on this map. Huge The first thing to notice is its schematic design. Like swaths of the so-called­ low city, the densely populated many topological maps, this one distorts directions, al- neighborhoods to the east and north of the palace, are ters scale, and sacrifices strict geographic positioning largely ignored by this map, much as they were bypassed to illustrate the connective relations between points. in the frenzied building for the games. The map, instead, Simply put, what matters in this map more than specific devotes itself to areas west and south of the old city cen- city streets is the intersections and their relative position ter. The cluster of trouble spots we see here, sitting north in the network. The map shows a total of twenty-­nine of the palace, are clear outliers, not only because of their intersections, marked with small circles, connected by geographic position but also because they sit far from a network of major boulevards. The shaded sections any of the important Olympic venues. surrounding each intersection, either light-colored­ dots These venues were concentrated in the west and or darkened lines, indicate the volume of traffic, from southwest portions of the city: the National Gymnasium 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., entering the crossing from a particular and athletes’ village near Shibuya, the main National street. Light dots represent the freer-­flowing roads op- Stadium near Shinjuku, and the Olympic Park Stadium erating under capacity, while dark lines show clogged Complex out in Komazawa. Shibuya and Shinjuku (near roads operating above their prescribed thresholds. The the middle of this map) were becoming the new “cen- figures next to each shaded wedge give the number of ters” of the city, a trend that had started after the 1923 cars above (dark lines) or below (light dots) the street’s earthquake but vastly accelerated in the 1960s. Most of calculated capacity while percentages indicate the pro- the streets featured prominently on the map are the so-­ portion this number represents, either over or under the called “Olympic roads” that, running alongside these street’s recommended traffic volume. Of the ninety-nine­ venues, were transformed in five short years from modest shaded wedges, sixty-five­ display “healthy” movement, roads into major thoroughfares. Kannana Avenue (Ring and thirty-­four show sluggish circulation. That is, about Road 7), running north-­south along the entire left side one-third­ of the streets channeling cars into intersections of the page, connected the Komazawa Olympic complex exceed acceptable limits, averaging 34 percent above ca- in the far southwest to numerous points farther north. pacity. And yet the map, buttressed by the accompany- While the full loop circling the city took fifty-eight­ years ing article (by Hirokawa Yukichi, director of the Met- to finish, the Olympic portion encompassing the western

You are reading copyrighted material published by University of Chicago Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. 212 Bruce Suttmeier half of the ring was completed, at enormous expense, in a that of building the new thirty-two-­ kilometer­ elevated mere five years. Even more substantial were the changes highway winding its way up from the airport and out to Aoyama Avenue, running east-­west through the mid- to the Olympic venues. Yet it is impossible to discuss dle of the map. Connecting the city center to Shibuya Olympic-­era Tokyo, or to fully understand this map, and Komazawa, Aoyama Avenue was dubbed “Olympic without considering the outsized role of the city’s ele- Tokyo’s Main Street” for its central role in shuttling visi- vated highway system. In the early 1960s, the highways tors to the game venues. Now a center for high-­end fash- embodied a near-utopian­ solution to the city’s traffic ion boutiques and trendy stores, in the late 1950s Aoy- woes. A high-speed­ road without intersections, it was ama Avenue was a modest street of two-­story shop fronts reasoned, would be free from the gridlock troubling the that was expanded to nearly double its original width for earth-bound­ streets below. The most exaggerated ex- the Olympics. Meter for meter, this expansion became pression of such thinking appears in the city plans of the the most expensive project in the city’s transportation Metabolist school architects, most strikingly in A Plan for overhaul.4 Tokyo 1960, by Tange Kenzo¯, the designer of the National All told, because of the extraordinary expense of Stadium for the 1964 games. Figure 49.2 shows Tange’s compensating landowners, the cost for widening sur- reimagined city stretching across Tokyo Bay, its design face streets like Aoyama Avenue ran to about five times dominated by enormous ten-lane­ highways structuring

figure 49.2 “Model, Office District in Civic Axis and Residential District on the Sea” [Mokei toshijiku no naka no ofisubiru chiku to kaijo¯ ju¯kyo chiku 模型都市軸の 中のオフィスビル地区と海上住居地区], from Tange Kenzo¯’s 1960 Plan for Tokyo: Toward a Structural Reorganization. Repro- duced by permission from Hirose Mami et al., Metabolism, the City of the Future: Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present-­Day Japan (Tokyo: Mori Art Museum and Shinkenchiku-­sha, 2011), 68. Photograph by Kawasumi Akio.

You are reading copyrighted material published by University of Chicago Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. On the Road in Olympic- ­Era Tokyo 213 the city through a series of stacked loops. This radical Notes redesign, he predicted, would allow a traffic capacity of 1. See Igarashi Yoshukuni, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War two hundred thousand vehicles per hour, or “from ten in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 2000), 147; and Philip Kaffen, “Ichikawa Kon’s ‘Tokyo to thirty times the capacity of high-speed­ highways now Olympiad: The Olympic Body of Memory,’” in Olympic Japan: Ideals in use.” Only by vastly increasing such capacity through- and Realities of (Inter)Nationalism, ed. Andreas Niehaus and Max out the city, Tange argued, could Tokyo be saved from its Seinsch (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2007), 50. “confused, paralyzed, even moribund state.”5 2. See Hirokawa Yukichi, “Orinpikku To¯kyo¯ taikai to do¯ro ko¯tsu¯,” Shintoshi 18 (9) (September 1964): 31–37. It is partly this utopian thinking—­the highways’ 3. See the influential pamphlet Do¯ro ko¯tsu¯ no konran wa sukueru- position literally and figuratively “above it all”—­that ka? Ko¯soku do¯ro o chu¯shin ni To¯kyo¯ wa wakagaeru (Tokyo: Toshi Keika- explains their absence from a map devoted to the mun- ku Kyo¯kai, 1959), 42. Iwaidabashi, listed as the worst intersection in the city, saw 121,911 vehicles a day. The worst intersection shown on dane, exasperating business of congested intersections. the map is Suidobashi, at 35,273. Also see similar figures in Yamada The new freeways seemed incapable of such congestion, Masao’s article “To¯kyo¯ no toshi ko¯soku do¯ro keikaku 1,” Shintoshi untroubled as they were by the start-­and-­stop frustra- 14 (8) (July 1960): 2–8. tion of surface streets. In the years following the Olym- 4. The estimated cost of Aoyama Avenue was 21.5 billion yen for 8,199 meters (2.67 million yen per meter), about 90 percent of pics, amid the excitement of Japan’s high-­growth era, which was for acquiring land and compensating landowners on city planners pushed for an infrastructure commensurate either side of the road. The bullet train, by comparison, was on with modern forms of mobility. Indeed, many planners, average a “mere” 687,658 yen per meter (380 billion for 552 kilome- ters). See “Ichi oku en no ‘orinpikku seisen,’” Shu¯kan Yomiuri 23 (41) from avant-garde­ architects to government officials, (October 11, 1964): 37. stressed that the city’s surface streets, with their chaotic 5. See Kenzo Tange Team, A Plan for Tokyo 1960: Toward a Struc- mix of pedestrians and vehicles, should function more tural Reorganization (Tokyo: Shikenchikusha, 1961), 19, 2. like the highways by being committed to the high-speed­ transport of people and goods. For many years, such mes- sianic faith led to the building of ever-larger­ roadways: Suggested Readings an often ill-fated­ effort to solve gridlock by creating a more motorized Tokyo. Cybriwsky, Roman. Tokyo: The Shogun’s City at the Twenty-First­ Century. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1998. Gold, John R., and Margaret M. Gold, eds. Olympic Cities: City Agendas, Planning and the World’s Games, 1896–­2016. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2010. Lin, Zhongjie. Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement. New York: Routledge, 2010. Seidensticker, Edward. Tokyo Rising: The City since the Great Earth- quake. New York: Knopf, 1990. Sorensen, André. The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty-­First Century. New York: Routledge, 2002.

You are reading copyrighted material published by University of Chicago Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. This reading is an excerpt from Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps.

Wigen, Kären, Fumiko, Sugimoto and Cary Karacas, Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps. Chicago, IL. The University of Chicago Press, 2016.